Microsoft Unveils New Enterprise Search Road Map

LAS VEGAS — Feb. 10, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today disclosed a detailed road map for its enterprise search products, including the introduction of FAST Search for SharePoint and FAST Search for Internet Business.

FAST Search for SharePoint, a new search server that will add the high-end search capabilities of FAST ESP into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, will be available as a part of the next release of the Microsoft Office system. For customers who are interested in the product, Microsoft also announced ESP for SharePoint, a special offering that allows customers to purchase high-end search capabilities today, with a defined licensing path to FAST Search for SharePoint when it becomes available.

“These two new products offer compelling, new choices for our customers,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, general manager for the Office Business Platform Group at Microsoft. “FAST Search for SharePoint will combine high-end search with the broad portal, collaboration, content management and business intelligence capabilities of SharePoint. And FAST Search for Internet Business will deliver search capabilities tuned to drive more revenue through Web sites.”

“We now have the largest team of engineers and researchers in the world dedicated to enterprise search,” said Bjørn Olstad, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. “They’re passionate about search and committed to pushing the limits of what’s possible. Today’s road map announcement is significant because it not only discloses what’s next from Microsoft, but it also provides a framework for delivering continuous innovation in the future.”
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SharePoint Diagnostics Tool (SPDiag)

The SharePoint Diagnostic tool (SPDiag) version 1.0, included with the latest release of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit, was created to simplify and standardize troubleshooting of SharePoint Products and Technologies, and to provide a unified view of collected data. SharePoint Products and Technologies administrators can use SPDiag to gather relevant information from a farm, display the results in a meaningful way, identify performance issues, and export the collected data and reports for analysis by Microsoft support personnel. This white paper explains how to use this new tool.

It is released as part of the sharepoint administration toolkit v3.0

Download SPDiag
Download sharepoint administration toolkit v3.0

SharePoint Conference 2009

An Important event for all SharePint related , it will be at Los Vegas, NV 19-22 October 2009.
SharePoint Conference 2009 will be the conference to learn about SharePoint “14”.
If you’re an IT Professional, an IT Decision Maker, an Architect or a Developer you’ll find a deep set of technical content to give you a kick start for SharePoint “14” and further your skills and knowledge with SharePoint Server 2007.
Event Site
Event on Facebook

Integrating External Content Repository with SharePoint Server 2007

Learn to design, implement, and deploy a complete solution for integrating an external document repository with the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). This sample demonstrates the integration of external content repositories with MOSS so that external repositories may participate in MOSS workflows, utilize tasks lists, and extensible metadata.

The solution allows for the viewing and management of documents in an external repository through the MOSS interface. While some repository vendors have provided web parts that allow document browsing and viewing, this solution goes far beyond these basic capabilities to provide a complete integration of the repository. Using this architecture, end users will be able to create libraries in MOSS that surface documents from an external repository without copying them into MOSS. Furthermore, users will be able to maintain the documents by using MOSS capabilities such as check-in, check-out, edit properties, version history, and document upload/download. The solution also allows complete integration of external documents with MOSS workflows, list columns, task lists, and other libraries.

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Egyptian MVPs dinner

On last Tuesday Feb 3rd we had a meeting for the Egyptian MVPs @ Microsoft premises in smart village, really it was a nice meeting and for myself I met the new and old MVPs and we discussed many topics and we had a conference call with Baransel Dogan Middle East & Turkey MVP Lead, he discussed with us some issues and plans related to our activities and after that Mohamed Wahby Academic Relations Manager in MS Egypt and my previous MVP lead took us to a dinner @ Sushi Maro restaurant, once I heard sushi I got shocked “No Wahby I don’t like sushi” but he promised me that they deliver also meat and normal junk food so it’s ok but sushi no way :D

Sherif Toni and Mohamed Nar joined this event with us and really I wanna thank all of you and wish to see you soon.

How SharePoint Forms Work

Each list type generally has a set of display, edit, and new form ASPX pages (DispForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx, and NewForm.aspx) that are provisioned when lists are provisioned. These ASPX pages are provisioned into the “content space.”
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Updating Content Types

Windows SharePoint Services gives you the ability to make changes to a content type, even after you deploy it to a site, add it to lists, and assign it to items. You can even ensure those changes are propagated to the children of a site content type.
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10 Best Intranets of 2009

By Jakob Nielsen

Summary:
Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint. Improving usability increased use by 106% on average.

The winners of the award for 10 best-designed intranets for 2009 are:

• Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
  
• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
  
• BASF SE, the world's leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
  
• COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
  
• Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a global professional services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (a Global member organization)
  
• Environmental Resources Management (ERM), one of the world's leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
  
• HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil)
  
• Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
  
• L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
  
• McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu also won in 2002 for its Australian member firm's intranet; this year, DTT's worldwide intranet is the winner. As such, DTT joins a very small, elite group of companies that has won the award twice: Cisco Systems is the only other member.

As we've seen every year, great intranets are found around the world and in all industries. This year, we have our first winner from Latin America. We also have the first winners from Denmark, France, and Iceland; Germany and the U.S. have both provided many winners in the past. We have one other first this year: In a sign of ongoing globalization trends, we have winners that are not headquartered in any individual country.

The consulting sector is this year's best-represented industry, with 3 winners. Given the knowledge-intensive nature of consulting and this year's trend toward more collaboration-focused intranets, this fact makes sense.

Bigger Intranet Budgets

As we've seen the last few years, large companies dominate among the winners. Among this year's winners, the average organization has 37,500 employees. Even so, fairly small companies like Kaupthing Bank with 3,200 employees can still win. Good user experience doesn't require size or humongous budgets; it requires talent and emphasis on meeting the users' needs.

One of the strongest trends over the years that we've run this design competition is that intranet teams have been getting bigger. As the following chart shows, when we started honoring intranet projects in 2001, the average winning team had 6 members; today, the average team size is 14.

The long-term trend is toward bigger intranet teams, with a growth rate of 12% per year.

Still, what holds for company size also holds for the size of teams: You don't have to be big to win. This year's winners include one team with 5 members and another team with 6 members. In earlier years, we've honored winners with 1- or 2-person teams.

Even this year's average team size of 14 is fairly small when it comes to providing a key work tool for organizations with 37,500 employees on average. One way to leverage intranet staff is to call on external resources as appropriate. Today, the predominant approach to running intranet design projects is to engage one or more consultants and external agencies to contribute parts — and only parts — of the design, while keeping overall control inside the company itself.

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SharePoint-Tutorials

Tips, Tricks and Tutorials for SharePoint users, bloggers and the community at large.
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Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Application templates are out-of-the-box custom scenarios tailored to address the needs and requirements of specific business processes or sets of tasks in organizations of any size. They also provide a starting point for partners and developers looking to build deeper SharePoint-based solutions. The templates make use of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 capabilities and are compatible with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to help make customization easier.
Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are separated into two groups, site admin templates and server admin templates, providing the right combination of integration with the platform and ease-of-deployment within an organization.

Site admin templates are custom templates (*.stp files) that are easy for any SharePoint site administrator to install into the template gallery without requiring server administration access. Available in English only.

Server admin templates are site definitions (*.wsp files), enabling tighter integration and enhanced functionality within the Windows SharePoint Services platform. They require a server administrator to install. Available in English, French, Italian, German, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese (BR), Portuguese (PT), Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Russian, and Norwegian.


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